A Dangerous Symmetry

The themes of circularity and continuity in the Ixil Triangle reading provide a good topic for discussion. They first appear when the author describes how the Spaniards, after vanquishing the Quichés and the Ixils, “took over the existing structure of subjugation and tribute already laid out”(63) by the elites of the indigenous peoples themselves. Before the Spaniards set foot on the continent, it was already immersed in a history of conflict, there were the oppressed and indebted and those who reaped the benefits of these conditions. Were the Spaniards merely inserted into a dominant role destined to be played by various actors over centuries of Guatemalan history? Their brutality and greed, therefore, were to be expected of a dominant actor. Their subjugation of non-dominant actors was only unusual because its destructiveness was intensified by their guns, bacteria, and horses. Otherwise history continued as usual, an endless contest between winners and losers. The author seems to suggest this interpretation. The “recurring cycles” and “remarkable symmetry” which he observes in Guatemalan history give the impression of order and inevitability.

Multiple instances of history repeating itself under different guises are cited within the reading. For example, the civilian patrols made in the 1980s to seek out subversion were said to echo the militias formed to protect colonial Spanish landowners, each fighting its own specter of threat, and the model villages maintained by the army in the Mayan highlands, also in the 1980s, reflect the strategy of the colonial Spaniards to fracture indigenous communities to facilitate their control and exploitation. Each individual element may pass away but the author appears to be illustrating that same roles run throughout history. There is always an oppressor and an oppressed who engage in essentially the same actions across time. This is where the notion of history as a permanent confrontation emerges; these roles involve asserting dominance, quashing threat, overthrowing old regimes with new ones. As the captain from the Guatemalan army unequivocally states, “the war against subversion is total, permanent, and universal”(82).

The historical perspectives discussed above are extremely problematic because they rob certain groups of agency and deny the possibility of change, as well as set up the framework for excusing historical wrongs and perpetrating new ones. If a human nature is posited which inherently creates social differentiation and seeks dominance over others, there is always an acceptable other and underdog. Even though power changed hands over the centuries of Guatemalan history and the perceived threat to the established order changed, a state of victimizers and victims endured, with the indigenous communities as the perpetual victim. This perspective of history is clearly one that will perpetuate violence in all of its manifestations because it necessitates conflict and naturalizes the aggression and prejudice of a dominant group over a non-dominant group which they have posited as inferior and/or threatening.

Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.

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